Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a government organization in the United Kingdom supported by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It is a globally important place for plant research and education, with 1,100 employees. The organization’s governing board is led by Dame Amelia Fawcett.
The organization manages gardens at Kew in Richmond upon Thames, south-west London, and at Wakehurst Place, a National Trust property in Sussex. Wakehurst is home to the Millennium Seed Bank, which stores seeds from plants around the world. Scientists at the seed bank work with groups in over 95 countries. In 1923, Kew and the Forestry Commission created Bedgebury National Pinetum in Kent, a place that grows conifer trees. In 1994, Kew and the Castle Howard Estate formed the Castle Howard Arboretum Trust to manage the Yorkshire Arboretum.
In 2019, 2,316,699 people visited Kew, and 312,813 visited Wakehurst. The Kew site covers 326 acres (132 hectares) and includes 40 historically important buildings. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. Together, Kew and Wakehurst have over 27,000 types of living plants, 8.3 million plant and fungus samples, and more than 2.4 billion seeds collected from nearly 40,000 species in the Millennium Seed Bank.
Mission
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew explains that its goal is to use science and research to gather all the information about plants and fungi and learn how they can be used.
A meeting held in 1976 by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew was important because it created a group to find out which endangered plants are being grown and where they are found. This helped protect plants by making it easier to track their locations.
Governance
Kew is led by a group of trustees that has a chairman and 11 members. Ten members and the chairman are chosen by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The monarch selects one trustee, with the recommendation of the Secretary of State.
As of February 2026, the board members are:
- Dame Amelia Fawcett (Chair)
- Steve Almond
- Judith Batchelar
- Fay Cooke
- Professor Christopher Gilligan
- Professor Ian Graham
- Sarah Greasley
- Dame Dervilla Mitchell
- Sir Paul Nurse
- Dr Fiona Pathiraja
- Kate Priestman
- David Richardson
Kew Science
More than 470 scientists work at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The Director of Science is Alexandre Antonelli. The Deputy Directors are Elizabeth Gardner, Paul Kersey, and Monique Simmonds.
Kew Science staff include those who work at the Kew Madagascar Conservation Centre.
The scientific staff at Kew keep records about many plants and fungi, including the following resources.
Plants of the World Online is an online database that started in March 2017 as part of nine important projects. Its goal is to help users find information about all known seed-bearing plants by 2020. It connects scientific data with images from the collection to provide one place where users can find details about plant identification, where plants grow, their characteristics, conservation status, and how they are used.
The International Plant Names Index (IPNI) includes information from the Index Kewensis, a project that began in the 19th century to list the names and origins of all known flowering plants. Harvard University Herbaria and the Australian National Herbarium work with Kew on the IPNI database, which was created in its current form in 1999. IPNI provides reliable information about plant names, including details about when and where new species, combinations, and names were published. It also shares data with other projects like Tropicos and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
Neotropikey is an international project based at Kew Gardens that focuses on flowering plants in the Neotropics (tropical South and Central America).
The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (WCSP) is a list of accepted scientific names and synonyms for 200 selected seed plant families. WCSP is widely used, and many important websites about plants use it as a foundation.
The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) includes all known vascular plant species, such as flowering plants, conifers, ferns, clubmosses, and horsetails. It is created using information from WCSP and IPNI, so it only includes names found in those databases. WCVP is the main database for Plants of the World Online. Since WCSP only covers some families, WCVP aims to complete the full list.
The World Checklist of Useful Plant Species lists 40,292 species, including nine non-plant groups (such as nostoc, forkweed, and brown algae). This list was created by combining information from several existing datasets.
Kew worked with the Missouri Botanical Garden and other international groups on The Plant List (TPL). Unlike IPNI, TPL included information about which plant names are currently accepted. TPL was an online project started in 2010 to create a complete list of plant names. It had records for 1,064,035 scientific names, representing 350,699 accepted plant species. It also included records for 642 plant families and 17,020 plant genera. TPL was last updated in 2013 and was replaced by World Flora Online, which was created in 2012 to include all known plants by 2020.